“My nature is to want to go out there and get him every day I’ve been in office, but then you got to start weighing the lives that might be lost over this,” Henderson County Sheriff Ray Nutt told the newspaper.

“It wasn’t worth it,” Sheriff Nutt told WFAA. “Joe Gray has been in prison out there himself, in my opinion, for 14 years.”

Gray’s standoff technically ended in Dec. 2014 when the district attorney dismissed the felony assault charge against Gray.

But, according to WFAA, no one notified the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office or the Gray family until last week.

“I didn’t do that to concede victory to that guy,” Douglas Lowe, who was the district attorney at the time, told the Dallas Morning News. “It had been going on for 15 years, and somebody just had to make a decision that it was time to say it’s over.”

Sheriff Nutt expressed relief upon hearing the standoff was over.

“The decision not to go in feels more like the right decision now,” the sheriff said. “He actually could walk out tomorrow and be a free man. We ain’t got nothing to arrest him for. He’s no longer a fugitive.”